


How Webcomics Have Impacted My Life

by FreyaRays



Series: Essays [1]
Category: Original Work, Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Essays, Sexuality Crisis, seriously guys this an essay, sexuality exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:54:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23402578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreyaRays/pseuds/FreyaRays
Summary: Just me exploring my sexuality in the best way I know how: writing. (Also thanks Sigrun for starting this shit)
Series: Essays [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683439
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	How Webcomics Have Impacted My Life

Imagination has always been an important part of my life, and from that comes an undying love for stories. They shape the way I see the world around me, supplying me with bricks of facts and experiences to build my opinions on. Imagination and stories fuel my dreams and guide me along the yellow brick road of my creation. Stories have planted the seed, the starting point of many fundamental realizations about myself, even if these realizations should have been obvious in the first place. This particular seed was planted when I found webcomics. Prior to my freshman year, I had no idea that webcomics were even a thing. However, after clicking on an ad for one, my entire word exploded with new stories, along with a new way to tell them. I entered a frenzy, almost manic state trying to read as many as often as possible, even to the detriment of my grades. In this frenzy is where I found Stay Still, Stay Silent, a webcomic by Minna Sundberg. The magic, gore, and atmosphere told me that it was a great story lying in wait. It was so up my alley that it may as well have been the concrete of it. The characters are beautifully crafted and one in particular has had a huge impact on me.  
I will admit that at first I thought she was a guy. Minna’s style doesn’t over exaggerate the female figure like a lot of others do (even she herself mentions that she has an androgynous drawing style), and I have never seen this character’spersonality used for a woman before. She was energetic and brash, the stereotypical male anime protagonist that I was tired of seeing. So when I spotted the curve of her chest and quickly checked her profile, I was very pleased to discover that she was, in fact, a she. Female characters are rarely ever both energetic AND brash, and it was unbelievably refreshing to find a character with new characteristics for my gender, instead of the overused stereotype I was expecting.  
Of course, as the story went on, more was revealed about her character, and I kept on thinking about how brave and interesting she was. I was paying special attention to her even though she was one of the newest characters and so should have been one of the ones I was least attached to. She was strong and funny and talented and impulsive, yet responsible. Then I realized: I had a crush on her. A girl. Crisis mode: activated.  
It takes a surprising amount of energy to question your sexuality, or at least it did for me. You’re basically uncomfortable in the presence of the people that you think you are attracted to, who usually make up about half of the population. So, every single time a girl passed me in the hallway, my brain made me drop the thought that I was currently having to question myself all over again.  
Unfortunately for me, I had gym that semester. Now I know there is this huge stigma about girls who like girls being in locker rooms, but it's usually more awkward for us than it is for you. And no, it's not because we are checking everyone out, it's because we are afraid of being treated like predators.  
For instance, I talked to a girl every day in the gym. We were the kind of friends of convenience that you often get in high school. Over time, I learned that she was bi, and although we talked about it, it was never really the main topic of our chats. About halfway through the semester, one of the girls who dressed out in the same aisle of lockers I did tapped my shoulder as I was about to head out. “You know that girl that you talk to?”  
“Uh, Lily? What about her?”  
“I heard her and another girl talking, and it sounds like they’re dating. She’s gay. ” She said this like it was breaking news. Like it was a big enough deal that it would end our friendship, and she was sorry that she had to tell me.  
“No, she’s bi, the girlfriend thing is an inside joke.”  
“Are you sure?”  
“Yeah, she is definitely bi.” I walked away, wondering both if I had gotten a tardy and why she felt that she had to tell me. Would she still be as friendly to me if she knew I was questioning? That remains one of the most weird encounters of my life. Here I was, questioning my sexuality, and someone walked up to me to warn me that someone could be gay.  
Sometime after that, Lily and I were doing our normal Thursday routine of walking and talking. We were talking about a mixture of everyday life, future plans and stories from the past, and I mentioned that I had become obsessed with the song Girls Like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko recently. She had never heard of it before, and then the natural flow of a good conversation took over, letting one topic flow over into another. She mentioned that some of her siblings were adopted, and it streamed into a conversation about the American foster care system and adoption in general. As we were walking back to the building, she casually said, “Huh, so even if you were straight, you'd still adopt?”  
This froze me in my tracks. This, I’m sure, is pretty high on the list of fears all closeted people share. I wasn’t quite sure I wasn’t straight, but I also wasn’t sure I was straight, so I couldn’t really correct her. I stuttered out a yes, and was in a daze the rest of the day. I couldn’t believe I had just done that.  
It took almost the entirety of the second semester for me to accept my sexuality. The ending of this process was literally me telling myself that I obviously like girls and needed to shut up.That I was obviously painfully attracted to girls. I wish this worked every time, to be honest. The constant self-doubt and inner reflection was enough to drive anyone insane.  
I had never really been interested in guys. I had a “crush” on a guy in second grade, but I dropped it with no emotional consequences after a comment from one of my acquaintances. I never really found men attractive, even if it seemed that every single woman around me found that particular guy “cute.” But I had always assumed I was straight. Why? I don’t know, I just thought that I would wake up one day interested in guys. I never really thought that I was attracted to girls. When you are a girl, there is an expectation that you will find other girls attractive; I just didn’t realize the way I found girls pretty was different from the way most girls thought girls were pretty.  
Looking back, though, it was painfully obvious. The reason why I felt so eager to be friends with certain girls, and how my stomach would flip whenever they would talk to me, why I always pointed out pretty girls, and why I had a crush (that I acknowledged was a crush) on the girl on the back of the bus. (Not sure how I managed to still think I was 100% straight after that one, but we’ll give young me a break.)  
During this time, I was extremely isolated. Lily could be the only person I talked to in a day. I ate lunch alone at a fairly large table, so it was clear I was sitting alone and looked almost comically lonely. Like something you’d see in a movie. I literally had zero friends at school. My relationship with my mom was at a breaking point, with her always yelling at me about my grades and only interacting with me to tell me to do something. My dad was pretty absent, as he has been my whole life. I am not saying this for pity points, but so that you can understand why what happened next impacted me so strongly.  
Enter Christopher. My best friend at the time and my eventual first love. He moved to my town in the second semester of sophomore year. The first time I saw him, I was hoping he was a butch lesbian, and thought maybe he was until he turned around. (He liked that story because he was trans and he was always worried that everyone would perceive him as the wrong gender; I never saw him that way, but other people inexplicably did.) He was the new kid and I was a baby gay desperately hoping for a girlfriend to the point where I was half convinced that everyone with short hair was a butch lesbian despite half the population being, unfortunately , male.  
We hit it off straight away. It was like magic. We were so in sync back then, we could finish each other's sentences. I thought I had found my soulmate, platonically or not. We were just similar and we never fought. We didn’t agree on everything, but when we didn’t we were respectful of each other's opinions. We both had a lot going on in our lives. He was pretty messed up mentally, and so was I. Turns out a year and a half of isolation will do a lot to a person. Like make them extremely socially anxious. So when he invited me to go to GSA (Gender and Sexuailities Alliance) with him, he guarded me as I shook quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else watched a video. That was the start of me feeling incredibly safe around him.  
I cannot emphasize enough how much it means to me to feel safe around someone. I rarely ever do. Not even in my own family. The feeling of safety is something I chase constantly. It's no wonder that I ended up falling for him.  
I started thinking about kissing him after a few months of friendship. At first, I just brushed it off as my normal intrusive thoughts coming into play, as well as how physically close we were, holding hands every day in the hallways or snuggling up to each other at every opportunity. After a year and half of almost no physical contact, I was screaming for it. His presence was like salve on a wound. I felt safe and secure when I was with him. We spent almost every weekend together and grew closer and closer.  
Then something changed. I started seeing him as more than a friend, and the thoughts of kissing him came more and more frequently. I convinced myself that I needed to be more than just friends with him. And of course I couldn’t call myself a lesbian, especially considering he was trans. I began to identify more men that I thought I was attracted to as well. I told him about my sexuality crisis (except for the part about me liking him), and he was very supportive. Eventually, I let my filter fall and started flirting with him. I don’t really remember how it happened, but he was into it, and we started dating.  
Our relationship very quickly turned sexual in nature, and I was always the one who initiated it after our first time. It was a relief to have an appropriate way I could act on my sexual intrusive thoughts and have them seem normal and okay.  
I fell in love with him. I know that much, that I loved him with all my heart and that I will probably miss him for a long, long time. He was the first person who made me feel completely safe, and I know that that isn't the height of romance for most people, but for me it is. It means that it’s okay for me to be vulnerable. To be myself.  
We broke up. I mean, of course we did. It was a high school relationship. Very few of those last.  
And ever since then, I’ve been a little more girl crazy than I was before. Now, I was girl crazy while I was dating him too, just like he was boy crazy while dating me. But I’m not really interested in dating men right now. And I can’t tell if it's a right now thing, or a forever thing. I was not interested in dating men before him and I have not been interested in dating men after him.  
I was sitting in my bed watching But I’m A Cheerleader (1999) when I finally reached my breaking point. Watching two girls fall in love filled me with so emotion that I was literally shaking. It filled me with so much joy and happiness that being with Christopher and imagining our future together had never brought me. Watching Graham run to Megan at the end filled my heart with so much desire and love and all I knew was that I wanted that in my life. All I could do after the credits rolled was think about whether or not what I had with Christopher was real and if it would even matter over the course of my life.  
So what was my ex? A fluke? A mixture of compulsive heterosexuality and my own sexual intrusive thoughts? Am I actually bi? Just very very rarely attracted to men? Am I biromantic? Why does dating men seem so drab and boring? I don’t think I hate men, but is it because I fear them? How come the phrase “my wife” makes my heart race, but the phrase “my husband” does nothing? Was it just that fact that I have never seen two girls fall in love before outside of some fanfiction? Is that why the movie impacted me so much? Am I just so starved for queer representation and all of the heterosexual love stories I’ve seen all my life just numbed me to its impact? Why do I find some men attractive but at the same time believe that none of them could ever hold a candle to women? Am I gay or bi and why do I need to know so bad?  
So with all of these questions running around in my head, I tried contacting my friends. However, they didn’t seem to really care, at least not enough to help talk me through it. So what does one do when that happens? That’s right, they post a rant in the notes of a fanfiction they wrote for the webcomic that helped them discover their sexuality.  
And who should appear in the comments of the fic but the Queen of the webcomic’s f/f fanfiction, Elleth. She said I could private message her if I wanted to, so I did. Because fuck it, strangers on the internet who are willing to listen are better than friends who refuse too. So she introduced me to the discord server, and I got the idea to start writing this essay again from there. From there, I got this essay betaed by a lovely person on the server that gave me some advice. The most impactful part of what they said is “this is who i am today, and even if this is not who i was yesterday or who i will be tomorrow, it does not invalidate any part of me as long as i feel the truth of it in my bones.”  
This resonates with me. It is basically the same thing I said to myself when I stopped identifying as nonbinary. That my identity now does not invalidate the identity of my past because I know what I felt then and I know what I feel now. These things can be fluid and ever changing, depending on who you are.  
All of this thanks to one webcomic. It only goes to show how much art can affect your life, especially the art of storytelling.


End file.
